ABSTRACT: The language of ethics can be viewed as consisting of
de facto analytic claims: Murder is wrong, One ought to meet ones
responsibilities, etc. I argue that it is narrow-minded to think, as Quine and
others do, that we should put scientific and mathematical claims above those of ethics,
for the terms of ethics fit together just as geometrical terms do, and it does not matter
whether there is any correspondence between such terms and an external world.
What matters is whether we wish to use ethical language as we do scientific language to
understand the world. We posit points in space-time, we posit rights and wrongs. The
former are no more real than the latter, and no less. Values, like circles, are no less
real for our having imposed them on the Lebenswelt.

A circle is the set of all points in a plane that are equidistant from a given point. A
straight line can intersect a circle in no more than two points. Such statements occur in
the language (or language-game, as Wittgenstein would say) of geometry. If you want to
understand and use such discourse, you need to be conversant with certain basic concepts
such as point and set. You need to know how those words are used. Whether points and sets
really exist or not is unimportant for speaking the language of geometry. As Quine has
said, there is what we say there is. That is, we are ontologically committed to what we
have to say there is in order to get certain jobs done.

What Quine didnt stress is that our ontological commitments follow our various
purposes. If our purpose is to geometrize, measure, survey, then we will find ourselves
committed to points, lines, sets, planes and such. If we want to explain the behavior of
the chemical elements in a coherent way we will have reason to believe in atoms,
electrons, protons, and so forth. It might be that we do not fully know or understand
what, or even whether, points and atoms really are; we simply use them to suit our
mathematical and scientific purposes.

Quine, with great perspicacity and aptness of expression, pointed out that atoms and
electrons are on no sounder epistemological footing than the Greek gods. Professional
philosophers are quite familiar with this statement, but have refrained from applying it
to the language and concepts of ethics  perhaps because they think the subject of
ethics is too loose, not rigorous enough.

The language of geometry of course has a rigorous logic to it  that is, the
concepts fit together in certain logical ways. We find that the concepts set and point are
such that most other geometrical concepts are understood in terms of them. If someone
asks, "Say, what is a point, anyway?" we have a hard time telling him, or her.
We say it is something with no size but only a location (which is really very mysterious,
isnt it?) or we might play it smart and say that point and set are undefined in
geometry. Anyway the idea is to get started talking geometrically, not worrying about our
ontological commitments.

Another interesting feature of geometry is that whatever is said is (what the
positivists called) analytic rather than synthetic. Although this distinction has come
into disrepute, thanks mostly to the work of Quine, it still is quite serviceable in a
rough and imprecise way. Analytic means "true by definition," while synthetic
means "true because of the facts." That is, its a matter of fact whether,
e.g., Madeleine Albright is in Washington now. Its a matter of definition that all
squares have four corners. You can imagine Madeleine Albright being elsewhere than in
Washington, but you cant imagine a square with only three corners.1

In science, especially theoretical science, the same is true. An electron has a
negative charge, and if it has a positive charge it cant be an electron, because
"electron" means "a negatively charged particle." Or if Im going
50 mph and you pass me in the same direction going 65 mph it follows by the logic of
physics that youre going 15 mph faster than I am. Such truths are analytic. They are
calculable. That there is a highway patrolman behind a billboard watching you break the
speed limit is a matter, however, of observable, empirical fact.

Now I want to argue that the language of ethics, like that of geometry, is likewise
analytic. [To my knowledge this position has not been investigated seriously before, but
it it not entirely novel  see Locke, Essay vol. II, Bk. IV, Ch. III (p. 208 in Dover
Ed.), and also Aquinas, Jefferson, and Kant.] The analyticity of English, terms defined in
terms of one another, is one kind of analyticity. But Im saying that the
language-game of ethics contains many analytic truths, and many others that are synthetic.

E.g., "You should pay your debts" (analytic)

"You owe me $2.00" (a factual-ethical statement)

Therefore you should pay me $2.00 (a factual-ethical statement)

In ethics there are certain key concepts in terms of which the others must be
understood. The word good: What does it mean? Doesnt it mean different things for
different people and different cultures? Can we really know what it means? Philosophers
have offered numerous theories about what it means or about how the word is used or should
be used. G.E. Moore suggested that it is an indefinable and that attempts to define it in
terms of something else, pleasure, self-fulfillment, or whatever, are bound to fail. But
whether we know what good really means or not, we know pretty well how to use it and how
it relates to the rest of the language-game of ethics.

For example, whats bad is not good. Whats right is good. Whats wrong
is bad. These are all analytic statements of the type: "all squares have four
corners." They are analytic statements in what Carnap called the "material
mode."

As another example of an analytic ethical truth, we all know very well that murder is
wrong. Anyone who doesnt know that is, well, crazy and dangerous (or doesnt
know what the words mean). But "Murder is wrong" is not a matter of fact, but a
matter of definition. To deny that murder is wrong would be quite as perverse as to
suggest that squares have only three corners.

Murder is wrong  this is an analytic truth; and wrong means not right, which
means not good  no matter what good means.

I am arguing that "Murder is wrong" is analytic because no examples of okay
murders can be found. Is this a proper approach? Wouldnt it make more sense to
declare it analytic and insist that no counterexamples could possibly exist? I am taking
the empirical route, accumulating empirical evidence to show that "Murder is
wrong" is analytic, and that is what I find in the facts about the relevant English
words. The a priori approach is wrong because I learned that murder is wrong by learning
English at my Mothers knee.

My students always protest that, e.g., self-defense is "murder thats
okay," because they dont know the precise definition of murder.

Which brings up another version of the "mere tautology" argument, found in
Jonathan Harrisons article, "Ethical Objectivism," in the Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.

Consider

A: Murder is wrong (in fact)

B: Murder is wrong (by defn.)

Harrison says A has substance but B does not. Once such a statement becomes widely
accepted, he says, it becomes a truism, whereupon we are reluctant to call anything
"murder" if we think it is right. If someone offers a putative counterexample
 execution by the state, say, or killing in war  we think such things
arent wrong, so we infer they cant be murder. So, he says, "murder is
wrong" ceases to guide us. He argues that someone who thinks B may, without
inconsistency, also believe that genocide is right, just by maintaining that genocide is
not murder!

He thinks we learn murder is wrong by way of an inductive generalization, but we
dont. We learn it when we learn English (or French, etc.).

Furthermore this argument is invalid:

Murder is wrong

Genocide is not murder

Therefore Genocide is not wrong

Harrison says these statements may be all believed together "without
inconsistency." But thinking that genocide is not murder is impossible, even
nonsensical, because of the actual meanings in English of "murder" and
"genocide." Genocide is murder on a monstrous scale.

Anyway, consider

Murder is wrong (by definition)

Murder is wrong (in fact)

Joe murdered Tom

Joe murdered Tom

Therefore Joe did wrong

Therefore Joe did wrong

Notice that both conclusions are "factual-ethical." This means that there is
no difference in content between "Murder is wrong (by defn." and "Murder is
wrong (in fact)." Notice, too, that "Murder is wrong (in fact)" does not
mean "Some murder is wrong" or "Most murder is wrong."

Anyway imagine really doubting that murder is wrong:

"Yes, Joe murdered Tom, but ... (it was self-defense, or in war, etc.)"

None of that makes any sense, because "murder" has an actual meaning in
English, as does "genocide," precise as can be.

All you would need to refute the assertion that murder is wrong would be a case of
murder that isnt wrong. But thats impossible to supply without changing the
meanings of murder and wrong. If I "murder someone in self-defense," that would
be morally acceptable, wouldnt it? No, no, that wouldnt be called murder at
all, but self-defense. The expression "murder in self-defense" is what
Wittgenstein would have called a breach of the logic of language, what rhetoreticians call
an oxymoron, what logicians call self-contradictory; its like the expression
"square circle"; its nonsense.

But what about the killing that goes on in war? Dont we give medals for that?
Yes, but thats not murder. The infamous case of Lt. Calley and the My Lai Massacre,
which occurred in the context of the Vietnam War, shows that even (or especially) a
military court distinguishes between the killing that is a natural feature of war, and
outright murder. The Army tried Calley for murder, for killing a village full of unarmed
civilians. (He was acquitted.)

Or, wouldnt murdering Hitler have been okay? Wouldnt that have saved
millions of lives? Wouldnt that be a case in which murder was good? Here we must
bite the bullet: Murder is always wrong, and murdering Hitler would have been wrong, too.
But perhaps we could get away with claiming that killing Hitler would have been more like
self-defense or justifiable homicide than murder. An attempt was indeed made on his life
by a group of his officers, and that decision might have been a morally difficult one for
the conspirators.

Is abortion murder? This is another hard moral problem. Abortion involves taking
"innocent human life," but is a fetus an innocent human life? A person? Murder
by definition must involve wrongful and malicious taking of the life of a person (you take
the life of a turnip when you pull it up, but thats not murder). Are abortions done
with malice?

Just because you know some geometry doesnt mean every geometry problem will be a
snap. Just knowing a few moral truisms such as Murder is wrong doesnt mean all
ethical problems will be easy. (By the same token great sophistication about ethical
thinking hardly guarantees moral perfection, either.) But it is important to observe that
the people on either side of the abortion issue seem equally convinced of the moral
rectitude and indubitability of their respective moral stands. No facts or observations
seem to budge either side. And of course this is the mark of analyticity. We might call
such analyticity "de facto analyticity" in recognition of the fact that such
analytic truths are only analytically true to those who accept them as principles, and of
the fact that they can change."Cant you see that abortion is murder?"

"Cant you see that a fetus is not a baby?"

These are not disputes about facts, but about definitions, about basic principles
 about which truisms are really true. Each side takes its own beliefs to be
self-evident. It is just as if they were saying, "Cant you see that a square
has four corners?"

To the pro-life advocate, saying that a fetus is not a person is like saying that a
square doesnt have four corners. To dispute a fact invites inquiry, observation. But
to dispute a de facto analytic truth  a principle  invites outrage. In the
same way, you could never prove to me that murder could be morally okay, without getting
me to change my definition of "murder," or of "morally okay," because,
to me, wrongfulness is built into my concept of murder. That is, to me and to other
speakers of English (or, mutatis mutandis, of any natural language) murder means something
wrong. Whatever exceptions you might offer, I will try to somehow explain away. This de
facto analyticity is not absolute, but it is binding on those who wish to speak the
language seriously.

Togoans think genital mutilation is an appropriate way to ensure the fidelity of their
women, so you might say its "right in Togo." But some Togoan women are
leaving Togo (with their daughters), which suggests that not every Togoan accepts the
Togoan view on this, and it suggests that the societys view or the cultures
view can be mistaken. And so the societys view is not the final arbiter of morality.
I believe the arbiter of morality is English (or whatever natural language we learn at our
Mothers knee).

Ethical truths (even though we might dispute them) function like self-evident truths,
and these self-evident truths are built into the language. But it must be admitted that
geometrical truths do not admit of very much change, while the concepts of ordinary
language (of which ethical language is a part) can slip and slide with the times. (2)

Still, the basic terms and axioms of ethical language form a network, a "web of
belief" as Quine put it, a structure of meaning. Such words as good, bad, right,
wrong, person, theft, murder, ought, should  all are intimately interconnected, just
as are the concepts of geometry. All are defined, understood, in terms of one another. For
example it is axiomatic in ethics that you can murder only a person  you cant
murder a parrot or a cabbage. You can steal only from another person. You ought not to
cheat others  because its wrong and you ought not to do anything wrong. You
should always pay your debts  because a debt is (or, the word debt means) something
you ought to pay, something you are obligated to pay.

Ah, but what if youve borrowed Toms pistol and now hes gone mad and
wants it back? Well (Kant would say), you ought always to return what youve
borrowed, to the person you borrowed it from. But in a sense Tom-the-madman is not the
same person as the sane Tom. Or you might argue that it does not break our moral rule to
defer returning the pistol until Toms madness passes. But such gyrations seem silly.
You just do not give a pistol to a madman, even if its his. That seems quite
self-evident, though one could no doubt concoct an exception.

So thats another difference between ethics and geometry: sometimes one ethical
principle will conflict with or override another, and that doesnt happen in
geometry, as far as I know. Ethics is not as pat as geometry. Ethics has a thousand
concepts to juggle around, some sharp, some fuzzy, while geometry has only a few, each of
which is clear as crystal. (3) On the other hand, even a
subject as rigorous as theoretical physics sometimes loosens up and applies Newtons
equations instead of Einsteins, say, even though Einsteins are, strictly
speaking, more accurate. (The former are true, but the latter are truer, you might say.)

In spite of such dissimilarities as I have noted, ethics still seems to me to be very
similar to geometry. And it is worth noting, too, that while geometry applies to a
made-up, abstract world of pure mathematical forms, ethics applies to the real world.
Indeed, science and mathematics abstract shamelessly from the real, concrete world, the
Lebenswelt as Edmund Husserl called it. The "physical universe" is itself a
grand abstraction, as clean and tidy as if a muscular custodian had been at work on it
with a vacuum cleaner and an industrial-strength cleanser. Geometry structures that ideal
world. Quine would say it assists us in the purposes we use it for. Ethics, on the other
hand, must operate in the Lebenswelt, a slobs paradise full of people and values and
politics and beauty and crime and God knows what-all.

The bedrock from which any human enterprise must arise, and against which it must be
checked, is the world of our common experience. Science posits quarks, forces, ether, etc.
to serve its purpose which is to satisfy a kind of adolescent curiosity. Religion has its
purpose, too  giving our lives meaning, drama, a story. Law, too, and politics, have
their purposes. Each such enterprise has its language-game, with axioms, definitions,
theorems, often implicit but still precise.

The language of science represents our human determination to both posit and discover
scientific truth. The language of mathematics posits and structures and then discovers
what it has set forth. The language of ethics is the application of our human purpose of
setting forth an ethical structure for the world. The language of religion sets forth a
structure of meaning for the world. The great idealists, commendably, understood this and
therefore took ethics and religion very seriously.

The world is structured by our various "languages of" this and that, toward
our human purposes. It is narrow-minded (as we learned from the experience of the logical
positivists) to insist that scientific language secures ontological commitment but ethical
and religious language does not. We need not believe in atoms or points in space-time
rather than rights and wrongs. It is a matter of the purposes we have for using the
languages of this and that.

Just as the language of geometry structures the spatial aspect of the Lebenswelt, the
language of ethics sets forth its value structure. Geometry talks about squares and
circles, ethics talks about right and wrong. Physics talks about sub-atomic particles.
None of these is more real than any other, as Quine should conclude.

The language of ethics, then, is as trustworthy as that of geometry  maybe more
so, for we are human beings, moral agents, first, and geometers (and "lay
physicists") after. Most of us would much prefer to deal with a person who was
without knowledge of the Pythagorean Theorem than with someone ignorant of right and
wrong. Whether right and wrong are out there in an external world is not as crucial as
whether we choose to maintain the language of ethics, to impose values upon the Lebenswelt
just as the geometer posits space and furnishes it with points and lines.

About Euclidean geometry, we ask: Does it fit the world? About an ethical system we can
ask: Does it fit the world? Quine would ask: "Toward what purpose?" Euclidean
geometry works for everyday geometrical jobs, and it seems reasonable to think that our
ethical intuitions serve us well enough. Whether our human, cultural ethics is "true
of the real world" has to be settled by pragmatic considerations.

Notes

(1) As Quine would argue, of course, we have to know the definition of "being in
Washington," and square in fact means "four-cornered" in English, which
seems to collapse the distinction. Still there are ways to get away with it, I think.

(2) Though not as much as Derrida and the deconstructionists seem to thin, or we
couldnt communicate at all. And we do.

(3) Its not always easy to find the square in a complex design, but when you do
it will have four corners. In the same way it is not easy to tell whether a certain
scenario involves murder, but if so it is wrong.